invited them to enumerate the 10 areas they wanted to see deregulated, with specific
recommendations on what they wanted done. By the end of the year Bush's office issued a self-congratulatory report boasting of a "significant reduction in the cost of federal regulation." In the
meatpacking industry, this translated into production line speedup as jobs were eliminated, with a
cavalier attitude towards safety precautions. At the same time the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration sharply reduced inspections, often arriving only after disabling or lethal accidents
had already occured. In 1980 tthere were only 176. This, in an industry in which the rate of personal injury is 173 persons perhere were 280 OSHA inspections in meat packing plants, but in 1988
working day, three times the average of all remaining US factories. [fn 8]
Bush used his Regulatory Relief Task Force as a way to curry favor with various business groups
whose support he wanted for his future plans to assume the presidency in his own right. Accordingto one study made midway through the Reagan years, Bush converted his own office "into a
convenient back door for corporate lobbyists" and "a hidden court of last resort for special interest
groups that have lost their arguments in Congress, in the federal courts, or in the regulatory
process." "Case by case, the vice president's office got involved in some mean and petty issues that
directly affect people's health and lives, from the dumping of toxic pollutants to governmentwarnings concerning potentially harmful drugs." [fn 9]
There were also reports of serious abuses by Bush, especially in the area of conflicts of interest. In
one case, Bush intervened in March, 1981 in favor of Eli Lilly & Co., a company of which he had
been a director in 1977-79. Buswhich it was placed in a blind trust, meaning that Bush allegedly had no way of knowh had owned $145,000 of stock in Eli Lilly until January, 1981, aing whetherfter
his trust still owned shares in the firm or not. The Treasury Department had wanted to make the
terms of a tax break for US pharmaceutical firms operating in Puerto Rico more stringent, but Vice
President Bush had contacted the Treasury to urge that "technical" changes be made in the planned
restriction of the tax break. By ATreasury Secretary Don Regan asking that his first request be withdrawn because Bush was nowpril 14 Bush was feeling some heat, and he wrote a second letter to
"uncomfortable about the appearance of my active personal involvement in the details of a tax
matter directly affecting a company with which I once had a close association." [fn 10] Bush's
continuing interest in Eli Lilly is underlined by the fact that the Pulliam family of Indiana, the
family clan of Busshares. Bush's choice of Quayle was but a re-affirmation of a pre-exisiting financial and politicalh's later running mate Dan Quayle, owned a very large portion of the Eli Lilly (^)
alliance with the Pulliam interests, which also include a newspaper chain.
The long-term results of the deregulation campaign that Bush used to burnish his image are
suggested by the September, 1991 fiProducts in Hamlet, North Carolina, in which 25 persons died. One obvious cause of this tragedyre in a chicken-processing plant operated by Imperial Food (^)
was an almost total lack of adequate state and federal inspection, which might have identified the
fire hazards that had built up over a period of years. This fire led during October, 1991 to the
bankruptcy of the Imperial Food Products Company, which could not obtain financing to roll over
its short-term and long-term debt obligations. 225 workers at the Hamlet plant lost their jobs, as did200 workers at the company's other plant in Cumming, Georgia.
Bush's idea of ideal labor-management practices and corporate leadership in general appears to have
been embodied by Frank Lorenzo, the most celebrated and hated banquerotteur of US air transport.
Before his downfall in early 1990, LAir, People Express, and Eastern Airlines into one holding, and then presided over its bankruptcy.orenzo combined Texas Air, Continental Airlines, New York (^)
Now Eastern has been liquidated, and the other components are likely to follow suit. Along the way
to this debacle, Lorenzo won the sympathy of the Reagan-Bush crowd through his union-busting
tactics: he had thrown Continental Airlines into bankruptcy court and used the bankruptcy statutes
to break all union contracts, and to break the unions themselves as well. Continental pilots had been